[amarte]

This is such a monumental subject lol. I keep returning to this trying to come up with some kind of adequate response but it's like I'm standing at the base of a mountain and I can't find much to grab hold of that doesn't just crumble away after I apply a little pressure.

I definitely follow you up to your last paragraph and it all rings true to me, however I don't quite understand, "It is my opinion that the answer is of the form 'consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints." Maybe the rest of what I have to say is just because I don't understand the fundamental component or constrains very well.

To me mathematics is the limit of description. I can assign a word to some observable thing and distinguish it from all other observable things. I can draw a picture of it to distinguish it even more precisely. I can use various mathematical techniques to describe it even better, perhaps even to arbitrary degrees of precision. But I fail to see how any mathematical technique can capture --the feeling of-- happiness, pain, etc.. These embodiments can not be fully realized by description alone. They can be pointed to, hinted at, and I think great artists can stir echos of them in other people, but actually experiencing them is beyond the capacity of description. That's why I wonder if experience/consciousness is something fundamental. A subsequent worldview would have as its central concern 'beings' instead of 'objects'; it would not exclude any current or future science, it would just shift it's focus away from abstractions and toward experiential beings -- with conscious beings, which we are, perhaps a special case of a much larger set. The gains would not be material, but perhaps there would be some improvements in the ways we interact with ourselves, each other, and our surroundings.

[Stupulous]

>consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints

There are two criteria I'm addressing here. Consciousness is either physical (produced in the universe) or informational (produced in the mind). Consciousness is either important to intelligence or incidental to intelligence. My position, which I'll justify below, is informational/important. If you accept that consciousness is manufactured in the mind and important to intelligence, that means we evolved it. Because it is a widespread evolved trait, it very probably is an effective solution to a problem against environmental constraints, towards the larger goal of reproduction.

Constraints might include the amount of genetic data needed to produce a useful output, how well it deals with failure cases, how well it responds to genetic mutations or how well it withstands viruses or cancer. The kind of stuff that is irrelevant from the perspective of an intelligent designer like us with access to basically limitless indestructable computational resources.

Physical/important I responded to previously, but briefly: the big issue is scale. Humans run on proteins and large organic molecules. If there was something nonmathematical at that size and in our bodies, we would very probably know about it by now.

Both informational/ and physical/ irrelevant are 'side effect' models. They have at least two flaws. Consciousness follows attention, not brain activity. If I do something subconsciously, I am engaging the same neurons but not producing the same side effects. Consciousness is not a disconnected afterimage of intelligence because I am aware of it and can perform reason on it. It affects and is affected by my brain. If it's a side effect, it's one that has been knitted into me, presumably to some benefit.

So what does that make consciousness? Taking it as an informational tool to some end, we can probe some interesting questions. Self-assertion, which I referred to earlier, is an interesting mathematical property. A set of rules that allow the system within them to prove its own existence? And it's a global property across all conscious experience, that's certainly of note. The benefit of consciousness seems to be related to awareness of self and environment (that's all experience seems to be) as well as executive function- we experience a sense of free will, presumably because evolution wants us to help run things from here. There's a remote possibility that free will is real, and consciousness is somehow an non-deterministic process. That and beyond are all speculation, though.

The belief system you describe is how I got out of nihilism and escaped what was an agonizing conflict between romanticism and realism (I like the song Imitosis by Andrew Bird for depicting that conflict). There's a cold, meaningless reality out there, but somehow there's meaning that is made of it. We matter even though (or because) if we didn't, nothing would.